Shifting Focus for Big Goals

This post is about the power of choosing your focus according to the task at hand.

I was inspired by a NY Times essay by Alexander Carlisle, “a 24-year-old software engineer whose pathetic swim career was best known for a Speedo malfunction while diving into a pool,” in which he describes how he worked with his goal to “swim the 12 miles across a chilly Lake Tahoe” in a piece titled, “Swimming Against Time, Ignoring the Finish Line.”

We know the planning strategy of breaking down a goal into smaller interim goals. The distinction that he makes is the power of shifting dimensions for marking progress, from space to time.

Alexander followed the advice of his Coast Guard guides: “If you want to make it across the lake, don’t look at the horizon.” They helped him to break down the swim into 30-minute segments, which changed the focus from the distance between himself and his goal to that of enduring through segments of time.

He said, “I think the source of such fortitude is misunderstood. It need not come from some emotional well of inner strength. Instead, it can come from the dispassionate knowledge that most big, scary problems are actually a bunch of small, less scary problems. Break up an unfathomable leap into comprehensible steps, and you can succeed.”

People with ADHD like to see results for their effort, which can result in a bias toward doing things that are urgent but not “Important” - those often being the projects that require work over time. So the strategy would be that of shifting your focus to think of what you are working on as time-based, not completion-based. Reinforcing this by setting a timer for your work sessions might help you make progress toward that big scary goal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/sports/swimming-lake-tahoe-cold.html?referringSource=articleShare